When AI starts running physical infrastructure: Rakuten Symphony at Interop Tokyo

What happens when artificial intelligence moves beyond generating text and starts running real-world, physical infrastructure? This was a pivotal question driving discussion at Interop Tokyo 2026.

For the past year, the global tech industry has been dominated by standalone generative AI applications. While these tools are fascinating, they often exist in isolation from the actual infrastructure that enables operations.

At Interop Tokyo, Rakuten Symphony made the case that the next frontier is an era in which AI steps out of the chat window to provide active support, from high-level decision-making to actual execution of infrastructure deployment and lifecycle automation.

World-class telco tech now available to the Japanese market

Rakuten Symphony was created to empower global operators with the same suite of solutions behind Rakuten Mobile’s trailblazing network. As a driving force behind some of the world’s most advanced digital infrastructure, the company provides cloud, AI, and automation solutions that empower telecommunications operators and enterprises around the world to modernize their networks.

To spearhead the adoption of these technologies within the Japanese market, Rakuten launched a dedicated entity in early 2026: Rakuten Symphony Japan. Leading this new endeavor is Koichi Masaki.

“In an era where AI is essential for business, infrastructure requires unprecedented scalability and agility. Having built and operated the world’s first fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network, Rakuten Symphony’s technology is perfectly suited to meet the demands of the AI age,” Masaki explained. “We decided that now is the time to accelerate our expansion in Japan to share this expertise with local industries and help them evolve into truly AI-driven enterprises.”

In Japan, Rakuten Symphony’s ambitions extend far beyond traditional telecommunications.

“We are prioritizing industries that struggle with utilizing data on the front lines or managing multiple scattered locations,” Masaki revealed. “Specifically, our main targets are the retail and distribution sectors, which mix diverse devices and have high IT automation needs; the manufacturing industry, which requires real-time AI control; and social infrastructure, which needs safe, centralized management for entire cities.”

For Masaki, the expertise gained from building the Rakuten Mobile network translates directly into solving operational bottlenecks across entirely different sectors.

“What these industries share is the absolute need to process data instantly, right where it’s created. Our role is to apply the ‘full automation’ and ‘low-latency’ infrastructure technologies we cultivated in mobile telecommunications to solve these complex frontline challenges and accelerate their business.”

The approach positions Rakuten Symphony as a vital catalyst for Japanese companies, eager to leverage AI tech but constrained by aging, inflexible infrastructure.

“The biggest challenge is the rigidity caused by legacy IT infrastructure,” Masaki continued. “Many companies are stuck with systems that depend on specific vendors or rely heavily on manual operational processes, meaning they lack the speed and flexibility required to adopt AI. In short, even though they have the data, they lack the foundational infrastructure needed to turn that data into profit using AI. That is a major bottleneck for digital transformation.”

How Rakuten Symphony is unifying physical and digital infrastructure

Aligning with the event’s theme of Internet for AI, AI for Internet, the Rakuten Symphony team presented a bold vision at Interop Tokyo: the future belongs to cloud, artificial intelligence, open-source software, and automation-powered enterprises.

To realize this, organizations need to overcome the hurdle of fragmented, siloed management systems. Rakuten Mobile’s Monta Vongsili took to the seminar stage to propose the solution for physical assets: Rakuten Site Management.

Rakuten Symphony’s vendor-agnostic technology unifies planning, construction, operations, and scaling within a single, integrated platform, allowing for unprecedented operational fluidity across sectors such as telecom towers, data centers, and EV charging networks. “The design eliminates specific vendor dependency,” Vongsili noted. “It allows for completely flexible responses without being dependent on a single vendor.”

The true differentiator is the platform’s native integration of AI. Vongsili demonstrated Rakuten Symphony’s AI Spatial Analyzer – a digital quality assurance tool that instantly verifies the work of construction teams on the ground via photo analysis, reducing human error, labor and timeline risks.

“Just by taking a picture, if it doesn’t match the completed state, the AI will flag the failure in a matter of seconds,” Vongsili explained. “Through proactive project management, the system identifies and mitigates risks before they ever impact the project timeline.”

As physical infrastructure scales, the digital architecture supporting it needs to keep pace. Rakuten Symphony’s Osamu Mizoguchi held a live demonstration showing how Rakuten Cloud is tackling the industry-wide challenge of managing both traditional Virtual Machines (VMs) and modern containerized applications. “Currently, many VM customers rely heavily on Windows, so transitioning to Linux and Kubernetes feels like a very high hurdle,” Mizoguchi explained. “We have built a mechanism that makes deployment as easy as possible directly through the UI.”

Mizoguchi demonstrated how Rakuten Cloud erases this boundary by offering a unified user interface where VMs and containers sit side-by-side, effectively democratizing complex Kubernetes management. “The user provisions storage without needing to be conscious of whether it is a container or a VM.”

Whether in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, retail, or telecom, this unified approach ensures that enterprises can build AI-ready environments without abandoning existing virtualization investments. For organizations managing decentralized edge clusters, this level of automated visibility and control is not just convenient, stressed Mizoguchi, but essential to handle large-scale infrastructure.

The power of open, multi-vendor connectivity

Reflecting on Rakuten Symphony Japan’s reception at Interop Tokyo, Masaki noted a distinct shift in what enterprise leaders are seeking.

“There is massive interest specifically in AI optimization through edge cloud and operational automation/orchestration,” Masaki said. “Companies want to know how to run AI with low latency and high security right on the front lines – like in stores or factories – and how to use automation to reduce the management costs of an ever-growing number of physical sites. We are seeing extremely high interest in this kind of practical infrastructure transformation that directly impacts the realities of business.”

The event validated a strong, latent market demand for Rakuten Symphony’s brand of technological intervention.

“We wanted to increase brand awareness by proving that the technology we cultivated in the telecom industry can be applied to digital transformation in other sectors, such as retail and manufacturing,” he said. “In terms of results, we were able to move beyond just generating technical interest to having practical discussions with many companies facing concrete challenges.”

So what happens when AI runs physical infrastructure? As the Rakuten Symphony team demonstrated, it leads to the elimination of manual bottlenecks, proactive risk mitigation, and a massive reduction in operational costs – transforming physical sites into intelligent, self-optimizing networks.

“Our ultimate goal is to build a highly robust and flexible infrastructure foundation that supports the integration of AI across Japanese society,” Masaki stressed. “We aren’t just providing tools; our aim is to empower Japanese companies holistically – from infrastructure to applications – so they can maximize the benefits of AI and redefine their competitive edge.”